I don’t know about you, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I have appreciated the gravity of Christmas. As a child, Christmas is all about the presents. It’s all focused on Santa Claus and Christmas morning. As you move into adolescence and young adulthood, you begin to have an appreciation for the entire season, the music, and the traditions. For many, nostalgia about childhood becomes a major part of the celebration.
But the older you get the more you pile on experiences that make some of that wear thin. You have friends and family that go in and out of your life–sometimes through broken relationships and sometimes through death. When you go to the house of mourning enough times, some of the frivolity of this season can wear a little thin.
My Dad’s father died of cancer the day after Christmas when Dad was still a teenager. Dad says that there was an oppressive dark cloud over Christmas that year. It was just a grim wait as his father lay dying in the hospital. Then death and grief. Christmas was never the same for my Dad after that. It was never the same even when he had his own family. That grief visited him every Christmas.
I wonder how many of you are having a similar experience of the Christmas season. The season is no longer frivolity and joy, if it ever was that. Instead, it is a reminder of a broken family. Of a painful childhood. Of loved ones who you’ve lost and who you never really stop grieving for. Somehow the season brings the pain to the surface all over again. I hope none of you are having that experience, but I wonder if some of you are?
The irony of that experience during the holidays is that the answer to the grief and malaise is embedded in the message of Christmas, but it often gets buried or ignored by gauzy sentimentality and secular distractions. And yet, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the message breaks through in the music:
“No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.”
The song looks the futility and the grief squarely in the face. It reminds us that we are in a cursed world because of sin but that Jesus has made a way to release us from the curse. It’s the best news ever. And yet how many people will have those words ringing in their ears at Costco or the mall or driving in the car and never even give a second thought to them.
“Long lay the world in sin and error pining
‘Til he appeared and the soul felt its worth”
Here is the message in song after song. The world is singing our songs, and yet so many of them cannot even fathom what those songs are about. Nor can they imagine how those songs might contain the key to life.
In many ways, Jesus’ interface with the multitudes in John 6:1-21 reflects the same problem. They are following Jesus. They are listening to Jesus. They are hearing and seeing the message, and yet they couldn’t be farther away from it. The multitudes are seeing but not seeing. Hearing but not hearing.
I’ve titled this message “Veiled in Flesh the Godhead See” not merely because that’s a line from a Christmas carol but because that title represents the truth of John 6:1-21. Jesus is God in the flesh standing right in the midst of the people, and they don’t recognize him. It’s like there is a veil over him (or perhaps over their eyes) preventing them from seeing him for who he truly is.
In these two miracles—the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus walking on water—some will see him and believe, and some won’t. What these two groups of people see in him reveals everything that is most important about them. And it will also reveal everything that is most important about you. What do you see?
I. What do you see in His feeding the five thousand ? (1-15)
II. What do you see in His walking on water? (16-21)
[Hear the rest of the message at the Spotify or Apple links below.]
